more communities

We launched Stack Overflow Careers with the goal of fixing how companies hire developers. Traditional resumes only tell half the story, so we created Careers 2.0 Profiles to fill in the gaps. A few months ago, we released Company Pages with the goal of reinventing the traditional job listing the same way we reinvented the resume. Today, we’re excited to announce a new way to advertise your company to developers with Company Page Ads.

What are Company Pages?

Company Pages (here’s ours) were created to give developers a better picture of what it’s like to work as a developer at a company. They focus on the obvious questions that every developer asks before taking a job:

Advertise Your Company Page

After we introduced company pages, we started getting requests for some way to show off those company pages to developers. We’ve had job listings on Stack Overflow for a long time, but we wanted a new way for companies to advertise the company itself: their benefits, their developers, and their job listings.

So today we’re proud to announce Company Page Ads, a new way for companies to find top developers on Stack Overflow. Company Page Ads come in three flavors that focus on your company:

Open jobs

Benefits

Who you’ll work with

These ads show up in the same places ads have always shown up on Stack Overflow — they don’t add anything new to the page. The difference is in their focus on a single company, and on the things that matter to developers. When you click one, you’ll be taken to the Company Page where you can learn more about the company and see what jobs they have open.

Company Page ads come in two packages that each run for 30 days. The $1000 standard package includes all three sidebar ads. The $2500 premium package includes both sidebar and banner ads that will run at the same time, giving the company full run of the page with no competition from other advertisers or companies.

The Company Pages themselves remain free — if your company doesn’t have one yet, you can create one right now and start using it to tell developers who you are and what you’re all about. If you decide you want to, you can purchase the Company Page Ads at any time through the website. And, as always, all of our products come with a 90-day money-back guarantee.

The Big Picture

We think Company Pages will fundamentally change the way developers look for jobs. Finding the right company, with the right culture and the right people, is the most important part to finding a great job. Over the next few months, we plan to add more features to let you search and filter companies to find the perfect match, and even more information for companies to fill out on their pages to tell you what you need to know.

I’ve just checked what the ads look like for my European hometown, and while there are not many (yet?), it looks promising. There appear to be real ads by real companies. Great. Here’s what worries me: Once Careers.SE becomes really big, the list of jobs will likely be cluttered with job offers of contractors, consultants, freelance agencies (or whatever euphemism you prefer). Now, this isn’t about working conditions at these agencies, they may not even be bad. It’s about the fact that when you are employed through an agency, your agent tries to find a job position for you, and you likely end up filling a role not suited best for you, to begin with, but suited best for the agency. It’s much like having headhunters take care of your job seeking needs; they’re actually caring more about their own job seeking needs, with “good enough” being all they care about for you.

My worst job interview was through a headhunter. I had told them I wanted to do development, and they agreed. During the interview, it became clear that it was actually a sales job. Wasted time for the company, wasted time for the headhunter, wasted time for me.

I got all my gigs by sending my own resume directly to the company’s very own HR departments. It’s a live and direct transmission, and the channel has a great signal-to-noise ratio.

Stack Exchange is all about a good signal strength and the lowest possible noise. Please make sure this will be your one main goal for careers.SE, too. Otherwise, it’ll be just another broken job site where you find one real job offer among 20 vague blah-blahs of shiny contracting companies.